Thursday, 9 April 2015

Then Spoke the Thunder… Savourng the epic narrative of a master prose-stylist

By Anote Ajeluorou

As often said
journalists write history in a hurry. Even in the newsroom frenzy that every
journalist is accustomed to, history unfolds in breathless speed and the
journalist is not just a witness to it, but its faithful chronicler.
Fast-forward many years later when he is in retirement and sits down and is in
reflexive, ruminative mood, with the support of ‘an enlightened banking
institution’ like Nigeria’s Guaranty Trust Bank Plc, and decides to piece
together many of the momentous events that shaped his long career that
literally spanned the entire world, what you get is as good, as expressive as
it ever comes.

This is the enchanting story of octogenarian Mr.
Peter Enahoro, the famous Peter Pan of
the Daily Times fame. At 23 he became
the youngest editor of Sunday Times
and from then onward, the world was at his young feet to claim. And he jolly
went ahead to claim it, and he has laid it bare for all to see and be enchanted
as well. Enahoro lived the charmed journalistic life as he records it in his
autobiography Then Spoke the Thunder
(Mosuro Publishers, Ibadan; 2014), a massive 730 page-turner that would keep
any reader enthralled in the fluidity of his unparalleled prose style for which
he is a master, his early years with a father whose word was law, the perils
that are constantly a companion of a journalist’s life, the many turns and
twists that governed his career, the many hard choices he’d had to make, why he
went on exile, his return to his native country, his efforts to revive Daily Times and the failure he recorded
in this regard.

Enahoro is not a romantic and so does not
spare even himself in this epic narrative, which he starts by tracing his family
history, a history that is synonymous with Uromi royal dynasty. His maternal lineage
are the Enigie of Uromi, with his
grandfather suffering exile alongside Oba Ovoranwen of Benin Kingdom, but was
later freed and exiled again to Ibadan before finally returning to his
ancestral throne. Here, we see the history of Uromi melding and clashing with
that of ancient Benin and culminates in the Onogie of Uromi killing Oba Ozolua
of Benin in an internecine war.

Thus part one is a historical excursion into
his roots and affords young Uromi and Esan people full appreciation of their
illustrious origin. Then comes The
Innocent Years section in which we see the Enahoro’s family up-close in
their growing up years, with a father who was always on the move as a schools’
inspector from Akure to Warri to Ede. It was a home in which stern discipline
ruled even though Enahoro senior was often away on field trips supervising his
educational districts. By the time the family party arrived Warri, young Peter
was ready for secondary school and the newly opened Government College, Ughelli
became the preferred option. It was here he met some of his lifelong mates –
Sam Amuka, JP Clark and many others.

Then he arrived Lagos a starry-eyed local
from Warri and fell in love with his brother’s gang and soon plunged full into
the seamy life of the city. As he testifies, “I arrived Lagos and straight away
fell in with Ben’s crowd. He was always the sibling with the largest circle of
friends. His Lagos crowd was a mixed bag of friends, with cranky aliases for
names… I was an eighteen-year-old rustic reared in provincial towns but going
fourteen in urban streetwise terms. Until Lagos I’d thought I was an urban
sophisticate. I soon realized that geography lessons at school did not equip me
to have a working vision of world distances and travel… Everything Ben’s crowd
did fascinated me…”

He soon joined the Information Department as
Information Officer, but a combination of incidents soon leaves him dejected.
That was when Abiodun Aloba, editor of Sunday
Times, approached him to join journalism proper. He jumped at the offer,
and became curb sub-editor. As he memorably records it, “The Daily Times set standards in Nigerian
journalism and that gave me pride. There was a bonus in the fact that working
for the newspaper I quickly learned that I’d signed up to an enjoyable way of
life. Journalism is not a job; it’s a modu
vivendi in which the editorial staff constitute a proud fraternity. The
opening hours were flexible, but the obligation to join the after-hours joie de vivre was mandatory… We enjoyed
ourselves, sometimes recklessly, but behind the laddishness was serious
professional pride; a sense that, working for the Daily Times, we were special”.

But trouble soon started when he and a group
of journalists started the idea of a union and petitioned the visiting London
owners. This didn’t go down well with the Lagos executives, as he writes, “and
the local management had eggs on their faces. Percy Roberts (MD) was
understandably furious. The senior editors were spitting mad. It was a vote of
no confidence in them, our people,
said Aloba (editor). It told the White people that they, our people, were out of touch with us, their people. We had disgraced the entire African world before the
White man. Shame on us!”

There were dismissals as a result and it had
a damning effect on morals among the staff. Enahoro couldn’t believe that their
group of protesters couldn’t stand up to management decision to sack some of
them. As he put it, “I couldn’t believe it. All the fight had suddenly gone out
of activists? This was crazy. Had we come that far only to submit timidly to a
clear case of tyranny? These scapegoats had been singled out by the editors’
hastily concocted, face-saving reaction designed to impress Percy Roberts, and
all we would do about it was disperse meekly?”

His sense of justice revolted against the
behaviour of his senior editors. What was worse, rumour was rife that he wasn’t
sacked because of his elder brother Anthony Enahoro’s political clout in Action
Group (AD). This infuriated him deeply. He made up his mind to resign and did
so. He was to take up a job in Ibadan. But he was always in Lagos at month end
to fete his friends at Kakawa Street. He was to get his job back on one of such
visits, and by which time Alhaji Babatunde Jose had become editor in a radical
reshuffle following from the previous failed protest. After he returned, a
combination of events in quick succession soon landed him from Features Editor
to editorship of Sunday Times.

According to him, “It had been an eventful on
year and nine months. I’d gone from a prodigal editorial subaltern of sub-Sahara
Africa’s largest circulation newspaper at a gallop. I was still only
twenty-three. There had to be a catch in it somewhere. I found it in the
obsession with hard work that drove me. Anxious to prove myself and justify the
bosses’ trust in me I devised a punishing work schedule… The Peter Pan Column that would one day save
my career from extinction in the Daily
Times was born in those circumstances”.

The Peter
Pan Column years are very momentous for the author besides his editorship
of the Sunday paper. It set him on a world travel that included places like the
crisis in the Congo and several other hot spots around the world. Eminently, it
was also the years that his column would bring him in direct contact and even
conflict with the authorities, especially following the coup of January and the
counter-coup of July all of 1966. Enahoro was considered to be close to Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi
through some of his pieces that were merely agenda-setting for the new men in power,
who he felt had begun to behave like the ousted politicians, but which were
unfortunately misread. He was a marked man.

The title Then
Spoke the Thunder in chapter 13 is a chronicle of the two coups in 1966 and
makes for interesting reading, as it lays bare some of the facts surrounding
actions of the principal actors, how he became a target with soldiers knocking
on his door and his decision to flee his homeland into the safety of exile. Sam
Amuka and one Bryan were his accomplices in the escape from the forces that
were after him. They slipped him through the border and into Dahomey, now Benin
Republic en route Ghana where he left for London and exile. He was strongly opposed
to the Nigerian Civil War, noting, “The slaughters of a Civil War that should
never have started, the deplorable use of starvation as a weapon of war, ands
the ugliness of kwashiorkor would follow, and more people who were
transparently honest in their intentions for their country would bleed for the
father-land. All this would come to pass, as I once put it, in front of my
back”.

Needless to say that he vehemently opposed
the war and campaigned against it and was in the opposite camp as were his
brothers who supported Nigerian side of the war as they tramp the world asking
for support in Western countries.

London didn’t quite work out and so to
Germany he went and got into radio. But that didn’t stick for too long as the
lure of writing became too powerful for him to resist. He soon teamed up with
Ralph Uweche for his Africa magazine,
but they soon fell out and he eventually set up his own AfricaNow magazine. This enabled Enahoro to traverse all over the
continent and met with all the leaders. He describes his meetings with such
heads of state as Libya’s Ghadafi, The Gambia’s Sir Dawda Jawara, Tanzania’s
Julius Nyerere, Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema, Liberia’s Samuel Doe in a chapter he
calls ‘A Parade of Lions’. But it is Doe he gives a full chapter. In this is a
study of the character of the beloved African dictator who might have turned
good, but didn’t.

In Eyadema’s bloody coup Enahoro saw African
leaders’ missing an opportunity to deal decisively with such future attempts;
with the blood of his predecessor still in his hands, they let Eyadema join
them in an OAU meeting. Perhaps by hindsight, Enahoro sees it as a moment they
should have turned him back and so reverse a dangerous trend that would blight
a continent as a den of coup-maker dictators for decades to come.

Next is his return to Nigeria and his
chairmanship of Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC) and eventually his
arduous assignment to revive his beloved Daily
Times that had fallen into hard times following its take-over by the
military government of Gen. Murtala Mohammed, as head of state. Indeed, it had
fallen into the usual civil service routine and a culture of waste and
mismanagement had set in. He gets this picture too late and vainly moves
against the tide. Too many powerful persons, including Minister of Information
and Culture, Sir Walter Ofonagoro, stand strongly in the way, determined to rubbish
Enahoro’s efforts. Even Gen. Sanni Abacha who asked him to take up the job showed
a remarkable reluctance to lift a hand to help…

Enahoro’s Then
Spoke the Thunder is an amazing book for its faithful historical account of
some of the events that shaped the political landscape in the 1960s whose
ripples still reverberate till today. His efforts at saving Daily Times in the 1990s and the
obstacles he faced should be instructive in view of problems still bedeviling efforts
to revive some vital national assets like the power, refineries and other national
investments.

One more thing that Enahoro and his
publishers owe his readers and followership is a compilation and publication of
the Peter Pan Column in a book form,
if he can still find them. Snippets of it that are already in Then Spoke the Thunder provide titillating
insights into the period, as they give a glimpse of the historical and
political tempers of the 1960s, his stance on some crucial national issues and
how his writings swayed public opinions in certain direction.

Then
Spoke the Thunder is an important national book as it fills many voids only
a journalist like Mr. Enahoro can fill. This also helped by his humourous style
that lightens the somber mood of some of the events. This is a book that shouldn’t
be missing out on anyone’s shelves.